Karma

57 teachings in the library are about this.

S2 - Introduction to Mahamudra David Oromith · 86 minutes · recorded March 11, 2026
David sets out the path as a straight one, shamatha then vipashyana cutting through to pristine awareness, and Garchen Rinpoche's answer that Mahamudra alone is sufficient. Mahamudra takes the mind itself as its object rather than reasoning through the five aggregates, cutting the tree at its base. In an experiment David reads out, we rest attention as the flashlight rather than what it lights. It closes in the stillness of awareness while thoughts move, then asks where the mind is.
Guided Meditation - Avalokiteshvara, Visualisation and Mantra David Oromith · 23 minutes · recorded March 5, 2026
A full Avalokiteshvara practice led line by line. You visualise the four armed form of compassion, with friends and family beside you, difficult people in front and all beings filling the space, then recite refuge and bodhicitta and contemplate the four immeasurables. The mantra comes with light purifying body, speech and mind, then the eight verses of training the mind, a dissolution into your heart, and dedication.
S1 - The Path of Vajrayana David Oromith · 88 minutes · recorded March 5, 2026
David places Vajrayana in context, as a branch of the Mahayana that throws nothing out and makes no sense without renunciation, bodhicitta and emptiness beneath it. Then deity yoga, where the ordinary self dissolves into emptiness and is visualised as Tara or Avalokiteshvara, taking the fruit as the path. Empowerment brings lifelong commitments, and seeing the teacher as a Buddha is no licence to ignore red flags. The evening closes with a public Avalokiteshvara practice, with mantra likened to a lullaby.
Session Three - Karma, Dukkha and the Spirit of Emergence David Oromith · 59 minutes · recorded February 28, 2026
David talks about the last two thoughts that turn the mind: karma, how our intentional actions shape our future, and dukkha, the unsatisfactoriness of constant seeking. He explains why reducing anger or attachment even slightly shows freedom is possible, and why the four lead to renunciation, or the spirit of emergence. Questions cover the four opponent powers for purifying karma, and children who recall past lives. In the closing practice we bring the day together and set an intention.
Session 3 - The Eight Verses of Training the Mind David Oromith · 83 minutes · recorded June 26, 2025
Loving kindness and compassion are extended from self to a loved one, a neutral person, a difficult person and finally a wide group, guided throughout as preparation for next week's tonglen practice. David works through verses five and six of the Eight Verses: offering the victory rather than retaliating, and viewing someone who wrongs us as a teacher, illustrated with the story of the borrowed baby. Members share how they tried the practice at home and at work.
D7S2 - Hell Realms as Dreams, and the Grip of Self and Other Lama Alan · 37 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
The hell realms of traditional Buddhist cosmology, and why they are creations of mind rather than places built or imposed from outside. Lama Alan tells of the Buddha's earlier life as a beast of burden, whose compassion for a fellow ox ended his own hell realm, and turns to how reifying self and other as separate undermines empathy and invites manipulation. The session closes with a short guided practice in which we invert awareness onto the sense of being an agent.
D4S4 - Full Shamatha, and Whether Consciousness Survives Death Lama Alan · 71 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
In the guided practice we narrow attention from the body to the space of the mind, before Lama Alan turns to what marks a full achievement of shamatha: a physical lightness and mental suppleness he traces through the ninth Karmapa, Atisha and Tsongkhapa. He argues shamatha, not vipassana or tantra, is the tool for testing whether consciousness continues after death, drawing on past life research.
D3S1 - Refuge, Devotion and the Two Causes of Suffering Lama Alan · 106 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
The refuge and bodhicitta prayers, examined line by line, with the image of trusting a dentist to explain what taking refuge means. Lama Alan introduces guru yoga and a self-empowerment visualisation with Padmasambhava, then leads a breathing practice in which we let go of identifying with sensations as mine, using a scratched phone and an injured knee as examples. The session ends with the three common preliminaries: precious human life, impermanence and suffering.
D2S4 - Four Questions on Happiness, and Reality's Blessings Lama Alan · 68 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
Lama Alan admits teachings on suffering and hell realms can leave people tense rather than steadied, unlike those raised inside the tradition from childhood. A guided practice puts four questions to you: what would truly make you happy, what you want from the world, how you want to change, and what you would offer it. He closes with a Tibetan aristocrat who lost everything and called it a blessing, asking whether reality rises up to meet genuine practice.
Session Four - Impermanence Makes Rebirth Possible David Oromith · 81 minutes · recorded April 14, 2025
This final session on emptiness opens with a guided Awareness of Awareness practice, eyes open, with Padmasambhava's question of what is aware dropped in gently. The rest is a live question and answer from emails sent during the week: why impermanence is what makes rebirth possible, how karma explains a joy that seems to come from nowhere, and what is aware once no self can be found. David also covers the unsettling shaken feeling as insight deepens, and the difference between mind and conscience.
Session 4 - Ethics & Patience David Oromith · 85 minutes · recorded February 13, 2025
In the guided Tonglen practice we breathe in a loved one's suffering, then a wider crowd's, as dark smoke dissolved at the heart, and breathe out light and wellbeing in return. David turns to ethics as the foundation of practice, likening unruly behaviour to bashing holes in a leaking boat, then works through three kinds of patience: staying calm when provoked, accepting what cannot be changed, and being patient with slow progress. One shares how the quicksand image helped with her own anger.
Guided Meditation - This Precious Human Life David Oromith · 24 minutes · recorded January 22, 2025
David begins from Buddha nature, the clear mind said to be present in everyone and impossible to lose or damage, then works through how rarely the conditions to recognise it come together: a human birth at all, the time and the inclination to practise, teachers, books and people who support you. It ends in going for refuge and a resolve to use this life well.
D4S1 - The Continuum of Mind and Turning Loss into Practice David Oromith · 90 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024
In this meditation we trace the mind back moment by moment to show it is beginningless, so every being has at some point been our mother or carer. David turns to using loss and theft on the path, drawing on karma and compassion for what drives someone to steal, and the story of Gyalse Togme dedicating his stolen robes to the thieves who took them. Questions cover lingering sadness in a practitioner of many years and whether dedication lessens a thief's karma.
D3S3 - Mudita, Self-Cherishing, and the Roots of Tonglen David Oromith · 88 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024
The session opens with a practice of mudita in which we delight in the good fortune of a friend, a stranger and someone we find difficult. David completes the seven point instruction on cause and effect, from recognising kindness to the great resolve, then explains why self-cherishing is the root of misery and how tonglen exchanges it for others. Questions turn to where kindness tips into people pleasing, and whether karma means we should not intervene in someone else's suffering.
D3S1 - Loving Kindness, Refuge, and the Workings of Karma David Oromith · 90 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024
The morning's practice is loving kindness, extended in turn to oneself, a loved one, a stranger and someone difficult. David presents refuge in the three jewels as an active direction we take rather than protection handed to us, contrasting it with money, reputation and other worldly refuges that cannot ultimately help. Karma follows, covering the ten non-virtues and the four opponent powers used to purify a negative action: regret, reliance, remedy and resolve.
D3S2 - Compassion Practice and the Two Paths to Bodhicitta David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded November 28, 2024
Compassion follows loving kindness as the second immeasurable, wishing others free of suffering rather than simply well. David explains why happiness chased through possessions never truly satisfies, using the story of buying a Dyson vacuum as a teenager expecting lasting contentment from it. Bodhicitta, the wish for enlightenment to benefit all beings, is introduced alongside two routes to it: seeing all beings as having once been one's mother, or exchanging self with others.
Guided Meditation - Purification with a Shakyamuni Buddha Visualisation David Oromith · 22 minutes · recorded July 31, 2024
The same four opponent powers, this time with Buddha Shakyamuni visualised on a jewelled throne in front of you. After regret and going for refuge, he comes to rest above your head, and white, red and blue light descends to purify body, speech and mind. It ends with resolve and a dedication.
Guided Meditation - Purification with Loving Kindness David Oromith · 18 minutes · recorded July 31, 2024
The four opponent powers in order. You recall what you did that was harmful in body, speech and mind and generate sincere regret without concluding that you are a bad person, turn for help to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha or to the principles you hold, then use loving kindness as the remedy, and close by resolving what you can realistically give up.
Session 5 - Purifying Negative Karma - The Four Opponent Powers David Oromith · 94 minutes · recorded July 31, 2024
After a settling meditation, David introduces collective karma and gives a concise summary of the course before turning to purification. He explains the four opponent powers, regret, reliance, remedy and resolve, distinguishing healthy regret from corrosive guilt, then leads a guided loving kindness meditation in which we apply all four steps. Questions cover a run of bad luck at work, whether places or mindsets carry negative karma, and how effective Vajrayana purification practice is alone.
Session 4 - The Ten Nonvirtues (Three of Mind) & How Karma Ripens David Oromith · 80 minutes · recorded July 30, 2024
After settling meditation and refuge, David shares Alan Wallace's teaching that the person who ripens our karma in a future life is not quite us, so even cruelty deserves compassion rather than blame. He completes the ten nonvirtues with the three mental ones, covetousness, malice and wrong views, then explains projecting and completing karma and what shapes the mind at death. Questions range over pure lands, evidence for rebirth, funerals, and the forty nine day bardo.
Session 3 - The Ten Nonvirtues (Four of Speech) David Oromith · 76 minutes · recorded July 16, 2024
The session opens with a short meditation in which we settle body and breath, before David explains what makes karma heavier or lighter: strength of intention, habit, planning, rejoicing, and whether precepts are held. He then works through lying, divisive speech, harsh speech and idle talk using the four branches of basis, attitude, action and completion. Questions cover polite excuses, withholding information from a parent, blunt honesty, and whether sarcasm in a family can be purified.
Session 2 - The Ten Nonvirtues (Three of Body) David Oromith · 75 minutes · recorded July 16, 2024
In the short guided meditation we combine bare attention on the body with breath counting, refuge and bodhicitta. David sets out the four things needed for a complete negative karmic act, the basis, the attitude, the deed and its completion, then works through killing, stealing and unwise sexual behaviour, weighing pests, vegetarianism, euthanasia and abortion along the way. Questions cover suicide, whether all beings incur equal karma, and taking a puppy from its mother.
Session 1 - An Overview & Introduction to Karma David Oromith · 87 minutes · recorded July 7, 2024
In the guided meditation on refuge and bodhicitta we count fourteen rounds of breath and visualise the Buddha and the three jewels. David lays out the basic law of karma: intention in the mind is what makes an act virtuous or non-virtuous, and karma is definite, expandable, never arises without its cause, and its seeds are never lost. He also touches on what continues between lives. Questions range from free will to why kindness does not stop hard things happening.
The Twelve Dependent Links of Origination David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded June 11, 2024
In the twenty minute guided meditation on emptiness we search body and mind for a findable self and rest in its absence. David then sets out the twelve links of dependent origination, from ignorance through craving to birth and death, using the traditional images of the blind grandmother and the potter's wheel to show how the whole cycle turns and how it can be reversed. Questions cover whether the six realms are literal or metaphors and what, if anything, continues from one life to the next.
Session 2 - Compassion David Oromith · 57 minutes · recorded June 10, 2024
In the guided compassion meditation we move from ourselves through a loved one, a neutral person and someone in conflict, wishing each freedom from suffering. David distinguishes compassion from despair, its near enemy, describing his own depression while working in mental health services. He draws on the Dalai Lama and a visit to a man living amid hoarded possessions to show empathy turning into active care rather than paralysis. A question on karma is held over for later.
Introduction & the Bhavachakra David Oromith · 91 minutes · recorded April 2, 2024
The opening session of a module on the three poisons, with a settling meditation on the breath and refuge before David introduces the bhavachakra, the wheel of life, as a map for the weeks ahead. He explains the three animals at its centre, ignorance, attachment and aversion, and how they drive karma and rebirth through the six realms and twelve links. No separate practice follows. Discussion ranges from craving versus healthy desire to letting go of possessions and fear of the future.
D3S4 - The Inner Practice and the Mala Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 59 minutes · recorded January 10, 2024
Garchen Rinpoche's inner practice, in full: Vajrasattva father and mother above the crown, the short mantra garland revolving, nectar running down the lotus stem into the central channel and out through every pore to all beings. Tenpa explains why this purifies although the four opponent powers are not named in it, and is no substitute for the practice that does. Then the mala, how it is held, which way the beads are drawn, how a round is counted. A ten minute loving kindness meditation closes the retreat.
D3S3 - Signs of Purification, and Vase Breathing Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 89 minutes · recorded January 10, 2024
Giving and taking is widened to friends, strangers and enemies, and to the three kinds of suffering. Tenpa relays Lama Zopa Rinpoche's daily minimum, enough to keep negative seeds from multiplying, and warns against visualising internal organs. He reads the dream signs of purification, and the real sign, afflictions becoming weaker, citing Ven. Thubten Chodron on her first three month retreat. Garchen Rinpoche's instruction on the channels and winds follows, vase breathing guided and the inner practice read out.
D2S4 - Preparing for Death, and the Three Cleansings Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 62 minutes · recorded January 10, 2024
Purification as preparation for dying, opening with death and impermanence and the seven branch practice. Tenpa defines the pair of words that recur in these texts, misdeeds and obscurations, the second meaning here the factors that trigger afflictions and thoughts that block meditation. The commentary he quotes likens the practice to surgery rather than slow medicine, and to aiming at one problem such as anger. The long guided practice runs the whole text, with the hundred syllable mantra and the three cleansings.
D2S3 - Why We Use Images, and the Hundred Syllable Mantra Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 89 minutes · recorded January 10, 2024
Love as a purifier first, from Garchen Rinpoche, then compassion practice again. Trouble with visualising gets a plain answer: a vague image is enough, and no mental imagery at all is no bar. A Nyingma translator supplies the four components this practice needs, positive images, positive thoughts, positive feelings and trust, the last explained through a washing machine we do not doubt. Tenpa then reads Lama Zopa Rinpoche's short Vajrasattva text line by line, and introduces the hundred syllable mantra.
D2S1 - Vajrasattva in the Space Before Us Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 89 minutes · recorded January 10, 2024
The morning begins again with the fourfold vision quest, then a recap of day one. Tenpa turns to Vajrasattva himself: the snow white body, a vajra at his heart, a bell at his left hip, and white as the colour of pacifying activity. He reads the aspiration Vajrasattva made while on the path, that beings be purified merely by hearing his name or reciting the hundred syllable mantra. A guided practice follows: Vajrasattva in the space in front, the four opponent powers and the six syllable mantra.
D1S3 - Teaching the Four Factors Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 92 minutes · recorded January 6, 2024
A body scan run in reverse opens the session, then loving kindness extended from oneself to a benefactor, a friend, a stranger and all beings. Rejoicing in what is virtuous joins every practice from here on. Tenpa places the practice within the three vehicles and reads the short Mahayana sutra Teaching the Four Factors, in which the Buddha gives Maitreya the four opponent powers of regret, remedy, resolve and reliance. Regret is practical, not moralistic; guilt concludes that we are bad people.
D1S2 - Why Purification Came West, and Inviting the Lineage Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 90 minutes · recorded January 6, 2024
Tenpa traces how three month Vajrasattva retreats came to be offered to Western practitioners from the 1970s, a tradition begun by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, and restates the key points of body, speech and mind. Loving kindness is guided for oneself, then for everyone on the retreat, then for all beings. The teaching turns to supplicating the lineage, and to mepa, the appreciation that Vajrayana rests on. A second practice invites that inspiration as light and nectar entering through the crown.
D6S3 - Pervading the Directions, and Basic Goodness Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 61 minutes · recorded January 5, 2024
An enhancement practice that comes through Buddhaghosa: the wish for peace sent to all the beings in front, to the right, behind, to the left, above and below, then to all beings everywhere. Michael Lobsang Tenpa then reads Jigme Lingpa on love as a loving mother cherishing her child, and Longchenpa on the karmic results of the four immeasurables. He works through the five faults of not knowing about basic goodness and the five benefits of knowing, then a short practice for all beings.
D5S4 - The Eleven Benefits Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 60 minutes · recorded January 5, 2024
The eleven benefits of loving kindness attributed to the Buddha, taken one at a time: sleeping and waking comfortably, no unvirtuous dreams, being adored by people and by non-human beings, gods protecting you, no harm from fire, poison or weapons, a clear face, a joyful mind, a peaceful death. Michael Lobsang Tenpa describes how the practice starts turning up in dreams, and what Atisha and Dromtonpa say about the three best ways to die. The golden portal practice opens the session, self-guided.
The Noble Eightfold Path: Sīla - Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood David Oromith · 77 minutes · recorded November 7, 2023
The session opens with ten minutes of mindfulness of breathing, with refuge and bodhicitta motivation, and closes with a shorter practice. David works through sila from the Pali suttas: right speech and its five gates of truth, timing, affection, benefit and goodwill, right action on killing, stealing and sexual misconduct, and right livelihood's forbidden trades and a balanced income. Questions cover lying to protect a friend from hurt, and working somewhere that sells meat or alcohol.
Beyond Regret - Four Steps to Purifying Past Behaviours David Oromith · 15 minutes · recorded October 16, 2023
In this episode, David explores the transformative wisdom of the Tibetan Buddhist practice of the Four Opponent Powers. As tools for purifying negative karma, these four steps offer a pragmatic approach to understanding and amending past behaviours. Whether we'd like to purify negative karma or would like a more mindful way to address personal regrets, these Four Opponent Powers provide a structure for overcoming negative habits.
The Four Noble Truths: The Causes (Origin) of Suffering David Oromith · 78 minutes · recorded October 10, 2023
The session begins with a short ten minute practice on the breath, with refuge and bodhicitta. David turns to the second noble truth, contrasting craving in the Theravada with ignorance and karma in the Mahayana, and uses a cup and a bank account to explain emptiness and dependent origination. Questions range across karma, rebirth, labels and identity, and using emptiness to loosen attachment to people we love.
Introduction & The Life Story of the Buddha David Oromith · 72 minutes · recorded September 12, 2023
David opens the Buddha's Path programme by outlining its twelve modules, then tells the life of the Buddha through a set of paintings, from the sheltered prince to the four sights, the years with different teachers, the night under the bodhi tree and the first teaching in the deer park. The talk closes with a short settling meditation. Questions cover the Pali language, how intention shapes karma, and magical elements in the sutras.
D3S2 - Atisha on the Middle Way Lama Alan · 96 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Lama Alan Wallace complements the root text with his own translation of Atisha's Pith Instructions on the Middle Way. Elementary particles, deconstructed by way of their directional components, do not appear at all, and the mind, neither singular nor plural, unoriginated and luminous by nature, is found to be indeterminate. He recalls the Dalai Lama asking the physicist Anton Zeilinger how he reached that conclusion without knowing Madhyamaka. Questions and dedications close the retreat.
D2S2 - Compassion, Not Despair, and the Small Adversities Lama Alan · 83 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Lama Alan Wallace returns to a point he had passed over, on training in compassion, and gives Buddhaghosa's analysis of it and its false facsimile, despair, which looks like it and is not. Practise first with minor adversity, the text says, and it will gradually become easier. Whether a thing is agreeable or disagreeable is the way our minds apprehend it, as with a dentist's drill. Half an hour of questions follows, on shamatha and dzogchen and on why expressing a toxic emotion deepens the habituation.
D4S2 - The Five Powers and Dying Lama Alan · 86 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Accumulating merit and purifying obscurations by the four remedial powers, why Atisha counsels offerings to spirits, which Lama Alan Wallace defends by arguing that the physical world is not hermetically sealed against the non-physical, and offerings to the Dharma protectors. Then the five powers for one life and the same five for dying, of which Atisha says there is no more wondrous counsel on dying than this. Questions on brain and mind correlations, lucid dreaming and whether the self is a composite. No guided practice.
D3S2 - Near Enemies, and Tonglen Mounted on the Breath Lama Alan · 85 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Teaching and questions, no guided practice. Lama Alan Wallace works through the near enemies of the four immeasurables, taken from Buddhaghosa's Path of Purification, self-centred attachment posing as loving kindness, despair as compassion, then the progression in tonglen, starting with your own mother and later mounted on the breath, and the aphorism begin the sequence of taking with yourself. A young father asks whether to put family responsibilities aside for a long retreat.
D2S1 - Renunciation, Refuge, and a Remedy for Each Adversity Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
A general notion is not enough, so Lama Alan Wallace works through the specific practices the text names for particular adversities: renunciation as a spirit of definite emergence, going for refuge, dispelling the arrogance that leaves a person as sterile as soil on a mountain top, purifying non-virtue by pondering the four laws of karma, rejoicing in virtue, and cherishing others more than oneself. In the guided practice we draw the darkness of the world into an orb of light at the heart, the receiving end of tonglen.
Illumination of Primordial Wisdom, Question and Answer Sessions, Session 3 Lama Alan · 93 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021
Appearances are handled differently in shamatha, where attention is selective, and in open presence, where it is not, and that difference opens the last hour of questions. Lama Alan Wallace tells a student with no teacher nearby to let the text itself be her lama, relays Karma Chagme on Mahamudra and Dzogchen being one as far as trekcho, and says fear of the mind dissolving means you are really getting somewhere. He ends by giving the oral transmission of the root text in English for the first time.
D4S2 - The Mind as a Black Box Lama Alan · 123 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021
Dignaga and Dharmakirti argued that we only ever meet appearances, so nothing can be validly inferred about a world behind them, which is why the mind only school kept the mind and discarded the world. Lama Alan Wallace then shows Dudjom Rinpoche turning the same blade inward, since the mind that observes is a black box too. Kant's noumena and John Wheeler's conclusion that information is fundamental follow. In the closing practice we seek out the mind as agent and observer.
D2S2 - Christ's Infinite Intention, and the Doorkeepers of the Heart Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 122 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Eva Natanya answers the challenge left from the morning by arguing that Christ's intention was infinite in the way a bodhisattva's merit is, so anyone throughout space and time whose heart is open receives it, and that an eternal hell could only follow an infinite bad deed. In the practice you bring your own death to mind, treating this as your last meditation. She then works through Hesychios the Priest on the types of watchfulness that keep the heart clear even of thoughts that appear to be good.
D1S3 - Mindfulness of Breathing, East and West Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 95 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Lama Alan Wallace separates hedonia, the pleasure we get from the world, from eudaimonia. He guides a mindfulness of breathing practice built on the Buddha's potter's wheel analogy, noting only whether each breath is long or short. The in breath arouses the attention and the out breath relaxes it. Eva Natanya then finds the parallel practice in the Hesychast fathers, and answers St Gregory Palamas's instruction to restrain the breath with St Gregory of Sinai: press the lips gently together, never impede the nasal breathing.
D5S5 - Prospective Mindfulness, and Questions on Karma and Free Will Lama Alan · 87 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The session opens with a silent period, with a choice of methods and two combinations Lama Alan Wallace likes, earth and wind and earth and sky, mindfulness of breathing leading into settling the mind or into awareness of awareness. He reviews prospective mindfulness: resolving to notice an anomaly or a dream sign and do a state check, and catching the moment of waking so the dream can be re-entered. Questions follow on free will, whether an android could be conscious, and whether watching an affliction arise accrues karma.
D5S4 - Probing the Mind as Agent Lama Alan · 71 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Consciousness is defined as luminous and cognizant, and Lama Alan Wallace turns Padmasambhava's next phase inwards: who or what is it that concentrates and releases the attention? In the guided practice we keep the oscillation going and probe the sense of being the agent, which he says can cut through to pristine awareness. The Heart Sutra and the Diamond Cutter Sutra follow, where even nirvana is like a dream, the Dalai Lama on why that turns sympathy into compassion, and lucid dreaming as the footstool into dream yoga.
D4S5 - Why Shamatha Cannot Be Skipped, and Questions on Dying Lama Alan · 82 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Lama Alan Wallace sets the physics notes aside and gives the rest of the retreat to Buddhadharma. He recounts asking the present Dudjom Rinpoche why hardly any Tibetans really teach shamatha, and is told they get bored and Westerners come for empowerments. Lucid dreaming that never questions the daytime reality changes nothing. No practice tonight: the hour goes to questions on karma in dreams, near death experience and dying sedated, closing with a burning coal melting through a cone of snow.
D4S3 - The Space of the Mind Lama Alan · 91 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Lama Alan Wallace fills in the piece most easily overlooked in shamatha on the mind: when nothing arises, attend to the space itself. Mickey Mouse balanced on his head and the Big Dipper's imagined lines show that the space of the mind is not inside your head. In the guided practice we move from shamatha into vipashyana on where thoughts come from and dissolve. He then reads the physicist Henning Genz on real things as excitations of the vacuum, shapeless in itself until it takes on a shape.
D3S5 - False Awakenings and Dream Karma Lama Alan · 94 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Thoreau on going to the woods to front only the essential facts of life, read out in full, then an unguided period, offered as half subduing thoughts breath by breath and half settling the mind in its natural state. The questions that follow take in false awakenings, one dreamer waking nine times over, and people certain they have achieved shamatha. Lama Alan Wallace gives the Buddha's answer on whether a non lucid dream accrues karma, and the experiment he wants run on where memories are held.
Part Four - What a Thought Is, and Choosing a Teacher Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo · 133 minutes · recorded January 1, 2016
Two ways of working with the mind, the controlling one and the letting go one, and why a wild horse has to be tamed before it can be trained. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo explains that meditation is not blanking out but asking what a thought is and who is aware, sets out the eight consciousnesses of the mind-only school, and shows how generosity without wisdom stays bound by subject, action and object. A long section follows on choosing a teacher, and on not postponing practice while waiting for one.
Part III: Approaching the Great Perfection Ian Baker · 197 minutes
Ian Baker turns from landscape to the six yogas of Naropa, read through a seminar Chogyam Trungpa gave in the 1970s: illusory body, inner fire, karma mudra, clear light, dream, transference of consciousness and the bardos. He tells the story of the prince who believed in neither islands nor princesses nor God, and sets Longchenpa beside Milarepa, for whom nothing compares with the yoga of inner fire. Questions follow on Mahamudra and Dzogchen, kundalini and tummo, and ethics for Vajrayana in the West.
Mind & Mandalas - Part Three Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · Ian Baker · 62 minutes
Questions from those listening. Eva Natanya gives Tsongkhapa's answer to why realising emptiness alone is not enough: living beings need form, and a Buddha must be able to manifest in form. Ian Baker takes the objection that visualisation is a flight simulator rather than a flight, and agrees it can become a trap. Lama Alan Wallace sets out what Atisha and Tsongkhapa said about consort practice, who it is not for, and how badly it has been abused. He closes on Dudjom Lingpa's Buddhahood Without Meditation, and how much effort it takes to reach the effortless.
Session 3 - Q&A Vesna A. Wallace · 46 minutes
Questions to Vesna A. Wallace after the two talks. She explains why the mirror here is a prognostic mirror rather than a dusty one to be cleaned, and why the elements are ultimately five lights of a Buddha's wisdom. Other answers cover how elaborate visualisation diminishes the habitual propensities of samsara while staying a conceptual bridge, why ordinary bliss differs from the bliss of nirvana only in being conditioned, and how brain and mind differ. She closes on drawing the side channels into the central channel.

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